1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an artificial bone and to a tissue engineering carrier.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is known in the art of plastic surgery to employ autogenetic bone graft as an orthodox method in the restoration of defective bone. The autogenetic bone graft is considered highly reliable considering the past operating experience thereof, but this autogenetic bone graft is accompanied with various problems that the quantity of collectable bone is limited, that the healthy bone is invaded due to the collection of bone, and that the operation of the transplantation takes relatively long time.
Because of these problems, there has been developed a method of employing an artificial bone in recent years, wherein a porous body containing calcium phosphate as a main component is employed as the artificial bone. This method of employing an artificial bone is now widely employed as means for overcoming the aforementioned problems involved in the autogenetic bone graft.
Living bone contains, as a main component, calcium phosphate as an inorganic component. The calcium phosphate compound generally has bone conducting property which is the nature of living cell to form bone by taking advantage of the calcium phosphate compound. Accordingly, the artificial bone is generally designed to form a porous material containing the calcium phosphate compound as a main component and constituted by a bone structure throughout the porous material.
The features of the porous material for constituting the artificial bone are very important for enabling the bone structure to be quickly formed throughout the entire region of the repairing portion, particularly the inner or core portion of the artificial bone. For example, JP Laid-open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2000-302567 discloses a calcium phosphate porous body having interconnected pores, an average diameter of the interconnected portions of the pores being 50 μm or more and an average diameter of the pores being 150 μm or more.